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Wednesday, August 21, 2013

When one isn't enough...

Lovely little light laptop

While Mr Geniaus is out working I am taking advantage of our trip to the country to have a writing day
but I am a little frustrated.

I am working on two projects, a World War 1 Writing Project for a local historical society and a book on another topic. You see I don't like printing off the papers I need to refer to as I write. I am using Dropbox for the World War 1 project bits and pieces and a combination of Evernote and Google Drive for the book.

When I do work like this at home I work with two computers; the big one for reading the resources I have gathered and the small one for writing. I can bring up my reference documents on the research computer and craft my articles on the writing one, when I need to do a bit of copying and pasting I can look up the odd thing on my writing computer. I find that I rarely need to print out a document. When next I sport myself a new tech toy it will be a giant monitor that will allow me to view multiple documents all at once.

The book writing process is progressing okay as I have a outline of what I am writing and I don't have to refer to other sources too often but for the more urgent task of the biographies I need to constantly refer to the resources in different formats that I have gathered in Dropbox for the dates and facts I need to include. Jumping around to view these bits on my little Windows 8 laptop is giving me a headache. If I had access to a printer in this motel I would be hotfooting it downstairs to print off all the stuff in Dropbox and help kill off a few trees.

I tried to travel light but one little laptop just isn't enough for me.

4 comments:

I sympathise, currently having to work with a single monitor as my PC died and laptop graphics card hates dual mode. Resorted to opening PDFs I'm taking notes from on tablet propped next to laptop. Not ideal, but workable until my new PC arrives.